10 Questions That Will Determine the Future of Work


Article by Jeffrey Brown and Stefaan Verhulst: “…But in many cases, policymakers face a blizzard of contradictory information and forecasts that can lead to confusion and inaction. Unable to make sense of the torrent of data being thrown their way, policymakers often end up being preoccupied by the answers presented — rather than reflecting on the questions that matter.

If we want to design “good” future-of-work policies, we must have an inclusive and wide-ranging discussion of what we are trying to solve before we attempt to develop and deploy solutions….

We have found that policymakers often fail to ask questions and are often uncertain about the variables that underpin a problem.

In addition, few of the interventions that have been deployed make the best use of data, an emerging but underused asset that is increasingly available as a result of the ongoing digital transformation. If civil society, think tanks and others fail to create the space for a sustainable future-of-work policy to germinate, “solutions” without clearly articulated problems will continue to dictate policy…

Our 100 Questions Initiative seeks to interrupt this cycle of preoccupation with answers by ensuring that policymakers are, first of all, armed with a methodology they can use to ask the right questions and from there, craft the right solutions.

We are now releasing the top 10 questions and are seeking the public’s assistance through voting and providing feedback on whether or not these are really the right questions we should be asking:

Preparing for the Future of Work

  1. How can we determine the value of skills relevant to the future-of work-marketplace, and how can we increase the value of human labor in the 21st century?
  2. What are the economic and social costs and benefits of modernizing worker-support systems and providing social protection for workers of all employment backgrounds, but particularly for women and those in part-time or informal work?
  3. How does the current use of AI affect diversity and equity in the labor force? How can AI be used to increase the participation of underrepresented groups (including women, Black people, Latinx people, and low-income communities)? What aspects/strategies have proved most effective in reducing AI biases?…(More) (See also: https://future-of-work.the100questions.org/)

Embracing Innovation in Government: Public Provider versus Big Brother


The fourth report in this series by the OECD: “…explores the powerful new technologies and opportunities that governments have at their disposal to let them better understand the needs of citizens. The research shows that governments must balance the tensions of using data harvesting and monitoring, and technologies that can identify individuals, to serve the public interest, with the inevitable concerns and legitimate fears about “big brother” and risks of infringing on freedoms and rights. Through the lens of navigating Public Provider versus Big Brother, innovation efforts fall into two key themes:

Theme 1: Data harvesting and monitoring

Governments have access to more detailed data than ever before, but such access involves risks and considerations which require serious reflection on the part of government.

Theme 2: Biometric technologies and facial recognition

A range of biometric tools offer opportunities to provide tailored services, as well as the unprecedented ability to identify and track individuals’ behaviours and movements….(More)”.

COVID-19 Tests Gone Rogue: Privacy, Efficacy, Mismanagement and Misunderstandings


Paper by Manuel Morales et al: “COVID-19 testing, the cornerstone for effective screening and identification of COVID-19 cases, remains paramount as an intervention tool to curb the spread of COVID-19 both at local and national levels. However, the speed at which the pandemic struck and the response was rolled out, the widespread impact on healthcare infrastructure, the lack of sufficient preparation within the public health system, and the complexity of the crisis led to utter confusion among test-takers. Invasion of privacy remains a crucial concern. The user experience of test takers remains low. User friction affects user behavior and discourages participation in testing programs. Test efficacy has been overstated. Test results are poorly understood resulting in inappropriate follow-up recommendations. Herein, we review the current landscape of COVID-19 testing, identify four key challenges, and discuss the consequences of the failure to address these challenges. The current infrastructure around testing and information propagation is highly privacy-invasive and does not leverage scalable digital components. In this work, we discuss challenges complicating the existing covid-19 testing ecosystem and highlight the need to improve the testing experience for the user and reduce privacy invasions. Digital tools will play a critical role in resolving these challenges….(More)”.

To Thrive, Our Democracy Needs Digital Public Infrastructure


Article by Eli Pariser and Danielle Allen: “The story of how the internet has become so broken is already familiar. More and more of our public life takes place on big tech platforms optimized for clicks, shares, and virality. The result is that we spend our online time largely in rule-less spaces that reward our worst impulses, trap us in bubbles of like-minded opinion, and leave us susceptible to harassment, lies and misinformation. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube each took first steps to rein in the worst behavior on their platforms in the heat of the election, but none have confronted how their spaces were structured to become ideal venues for outrage and incitement…

The first step in the process is realizing that the problems we’re experiencing in digital life — how to gather strangers together in public in ways that make it so people generally behave themselves — aren’t new. They’re problems that physical communities have wrestled with for centuries. In physical communities, businesses play a critical role — but so do public libraries, schools, parks and roads. These spaces are often the groundwork that private industry builds itself around: Schools teach and train the next generation of workers; new public parks and plazas often spur private real estate development; businesses transport goods on publicly funded roads; and so on. Public spaces and private industry work symbiotically, if sometimes imperfectly.

Beyond their instrumental value for prosperity, we need public spaces and institutions to weave and maintain our social fabric. In physical communities, parks and libraries aren’t just places for exercise or book-borrowing — they also create social connections, a sense of community identity, and a venue in which differences and inequalities can be surfaced and addressed. Public spaces provide access to essential resources for people who couldn’t otherwise access them — whether it’s an outdoor workout station, basketball court, or books in a library — but they are some of the few spaces in a community where we get a glimpse of each other’s lives and help us see ourselves as part of a pluralistic but cohesive society….

If mission, design and governance are important ingredients, the final component is what might be called digital essential workers — professionals like librarians whose job is to manage, steward, and care for the people in these spaces. This care work is one of the pillars of successful physical communities which has been abstracted away by the existing tech platforms. Scholar Joan Donovan has called for 10,000 librarians for the Internet, while Sarah R. Roberts has pointed out that doing curation at scale would be impossible within the current social media business model. At a time when our country is pulling apart and many Americans need work, it’s worth considering whether we need an AmeriCorps for digital space.

How might we pay for this? A two-year project one of us helped lead at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences issued a final report that recommended taxing what’s known as “targeted advertising” — the kind Google and Facebook rely on for their revenue — in order to support the democratic functions social platforms have had a hand in dismantling, like local journalism. The truth is that Facebook, Google, and Twitter have displaced and sucked the revenue out of an entire ecosystem of local journalistic enterprises and other institutions that served some of these public functions. Those three companies alone made nearly $33 billion in profits in the third quarter of 2020 alone — and that profit margin in part comes from not having to pay for the negative externalities they create or the public goods they erode. Using some of those funds to support public digital infrastructure seems eminently reasonable….(More)”.

Inside India’s booming dark data economy


Snigdha Poonam and Samarath Bansal at the Rest of the World: “…The black market for data, as it exists online in India, resembles those for wholesale vegetables or smuggled goods. Customers are encouraged to buy in bulk, and the variety of what’s on offer is mind-boggling: There are databases about parents, cable customers, pregnant women, pizza eaters, mutual funds investors, and almost any niche group one can imagine. A typical database consists of a spreadsheet with row after row of names and key details: Sheila Gupta, 35, lives in Kolkata, runs a travel agency, and owns a BMW; Irfaan Khan, 52, lives in Greater Noida, and has a son who just applied to engineering college. The databases are usually updated every three months (the older one is, the less it is worth), and if you buy several at the same time, you’ll get a discount. Business is always brisk, and transactions are conducted quickly. No one will ask you for your name, let alone inquire why you want the phone numbers of five million people who have applied for bank loans.

There isn’t a reliable estimate of the size of India’s data economy or of how much money it generates annually. Regarding the former, each broker we spoke to had a different guess: One said only about one or two hundred professionals make up the top tier, another that every big Indian city has at least a thousand people trading data. To find them, potential customers need only look for their ads on social media or run searches with industry keywords and hashtags — “data,” “leads,” “database” — combined with detailed information about the kind of data they want and the city they want it from.

Privacy experts believe that the data-brokering industry has existed since the early days of the internet’s arrival in India. “Databases have been bought and sold in India for at least 15 years now. I remember a case from way back in 2006 of leaked employee data from Naukri.com (one of India’s first online job portals) being sold on CDs,” says Nikhil Pahwa, the editor and publisher of MediaNama, which covers technology policy. By 2009, data brokers were running SMS-marketing companies that offered complementary services: procuring targeted data and sending text messages in bulk. Back then, there was simply less data, “and those who had it could sell it at whatever price,” says Himanshu Bhatt, a data broker who claims to be retired. That is no longer the case: “Today, everyone has every kind of data,” he said.

No broker we contacted would openly discuss their methods of hunting, harvesting, and selling data. But the day-to-day work generally consists of following the trails that people leave during their travels around the internet. Brokers trawl data storage websites armed with a digital fishing net. “I was shocked when I was surfing [cloud-hosted data sites] one day and came across Aadhaar cards,” Bhatt remarked, referring to India’s state-issued biometric ID cards. Images of them were available to download in bulk, alongside completed loan applications and salary sheets.

Again, the legal boundaries here are far from clear. Anybody who has ever filled out a form on a coupon website or requested a refund for a movie ticket has effectively entered their information into a database that can be sold without their consent by the company it belongs to. A neighborhood cell phone store can sell demographic information to a political party for hyperlocal campaigning, and a fintech company can stealthily transfer an individual’s details from an astrology app onto its own server, to gauge that person’s creditworthiness. When somebody shares employment history on LinkedIn or contact details on a public directory, brokers can use basic software such as web scrapers to extract that data.

But why bother hacking into a database when you can buy it outright? More often, “brokers will directly approach a bank employee and tell them, ‘I need the high-end database’,” Bhatt said. And as demand for information increases, so, too, does data vulnerability. A 2019 survey found that 69% of Indian companies haven’t set up reliable data security systems; 44% have experienced at least one breach already. “In the past 12 months, we have seen an increasing trend of Indians’ data [appearing] on the dark web,” says Beenu Arora, the CEO of the global cyberintelligence firm Cyble….(More)”.

The Control Paradox: From AI to Populism


Book by Ezio Di Nucci: “Is technological innovation spinning out of control? During a one-week period in 2018, social media was revealed to have had huge undue influence on the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the first fatality from a self-driving car was recorded. What’s paradoxical about the understandable fear of machines taking control through software, robots, and artificial intelligence is that new technology is often introduced in order to increase our control of a certain task. This is what Ezio Di Nucci calls the “control paradox.”

Di Nucci also brings this notion to bear on politics: we delegate power and control to political representatives in order to improve democratic governance. However, recent populist uprisings have shown that voters feel disempowered and neglected by this system. This lack of direct control within representative democracies could be a motivating factor for populism, and Di Nucci argues that a better understanding of delegation is a possible solution….(More)”.

A nudge in the right direction


Report by Partnership for Public Service and Grant Thornton: “The people of this nation depend on government to perform at the highest level. To optimize performance, some agencies are drawing on knowledge about human behavior to improve how they do business. By understanding how people process information and make decisions, and using that knowledge to inform how programs are designed and administered, those agencies
are producing better results—often quickly and at little cost.

At the Department of Education, staff and a team of outside researchers sent personalized text messages over the summer to high school graduates who had been accepted to college, boosting how many enrolled in the fall. The Department of Defense increased the number of service members who enrolled in the Thrift Savings Plan, the federal government’s retirement program, by nudging them at a “reset” point in their life—as they transferred to a new base. And an easier to understand letter from the Department of Agriculture’s National School Lunch Program asking participants to verify their eligibility led to a higher response rate and fewer
eligible participants losing access to the program.

While the application of behavioral insights has tremendous potential to improve the work of government, the movement is still in early stages.

To encourage more widespread use, the Partnership for Public Service and Grant Thornton hosted five workshops with federal employees between March and September 2020. The sessions examined how behavioral insights could improve processes and programs and deliver better agency performance.

This report presents the findings from those workshops, including insights from workshop presenters, many of whom are applying behavioral insights in their own agencies. It explains how behavioral insights can make government more effective; provides tips for choosing a behavioral insights project and getting leaders to buy in; describes how to test whether a behavioral insights project was successful; and offers guidance on how to build on the results of a test….(More)”.

Steering through capability


Paper by Geoff Mulgan: ‘… shows why governments should steer and how they can show the way for our societies to overcome the transformational challenges that they are facing in the current century, from the climate crisis to aging populations.

The paper’s focus is on “steering through capability” – not using only tools of downward control, but rather enhancing the capabilities and problem-solving skills of other tiers of government, citizens and businesses. To do this, the paper describes how governments can combine direction with experimentation, linking multiple partners through so called ‘constellations’; showing how these can be supported by ‘intelligence assemblies’ that orchestrate rapid learning and mobilization of data, and the curation of knowledge commons. These are summarized in to five keys for the future of steering – potent tools for any government seeking to lead our societies through the challenges ahead….(More)”.

Is a racially-biased algorithm delaying health care for one million Black people?


Jyoti Madhusoodanan at Nature: “One million Black adults in the United States might be treated earlier for kidney disease if doctors were to remove a controversial ‘race-based correction factor’ from an algorithm they use to diagnose people and decide whether to administer medication, a comprehensive analysis finds.

Critics of the factor question its medical validity and say it potentially perpetuates racial bias — and that the latest study, published on 2 December in JAMA1, strengthens growing calls to discontinue its use.

“A population that is marginalized and much less likely to have necessary resources and support is the last group we want to put in a situation where they’re going to have delays in diagnosis and treatment,” says nephrologist Keith Norris at the University of California, Los Angeles, who argues for retiring the correction until there’s clear evidence that it’s necessary.

On the flip side, others say that the correction is based on scientific data that can’t be ignored, although they, too, agree that its basis on race is a problem….(More)”.

Enhancing Government Effectiveness and Transparency: The Fight Against Corruption


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Report by The World Bank: “… has undertaken a fresh assessment of challenges governments face in tackling corruption, what instruments tend to work and why, and how incremental progress is being achieved in specific country contexts. This flagship report shows positive examples of how countries are progressing in their fight against corruption. It is part of a series of initiatives being led by the Equitable Growth, Finance & Institutions (EFI) Vice Presidency to reaffirm the Bank’s commitment to anticorruption. The report follows the Anticorruption Initiatives completed last December. It also informs our pending work on the Bank’s Anticorruption Action Plan – on how we will be implementing anticorruption work going forward.

The report draws on the collective experts of staff across the World Bank to develop ways for enhancing the effectiveness of anti-corruption strategies in selected sectors and through targeted policy instruments. It covers issues, challenges and trends in five key thematic areas: Public Procurement; Public Infrastructure; State Owned Enterprises; Customs Administration; and Delivery of Services in selected sectors. The report also focuses on cross-cutting themes such as transparency, citizen engagement and Gov-tech; selected tools to build integrity; and the role and effectiveness of anticorruption agencies, tax and audit administrations, and justice systems. It features a country case study on Malaysia that traces the history of a country’s anti-corruption efforts over the last few decades…(More)”.